This invention pertains generally to input/output device performance tuning, and more particularly to a RAID device controller that is explicitly tuned to provide high-performance without imposing significant overhead during normal input/output operations.
Modern computers, particularly computers operating in a server environment, benefit from a large, fault-tolerant data storage system. Hard drives in all computer systems are susceptible to failures caused by temperature variations, head crashes, motor failure, controller failure, and changing voltage conditions, among other causes. To improve reliability and protect the data in data storage systems, many data storage systems use a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) operated by a disk array controller. In a RAID storage system, data storage redundancy is achieved by mirroring a copy of the data on one disk drive onto another disk drive (e.g. RAID 1), or by storing the data on a plurality of disk drives along with parity data, that permits the original data on any single drive that may fail to be reconstructed on the basis of the data and parity stored on the remaining disk drives (e.g. RAID 3, RAID 4, RAID 5, as well as other RAID and non-RAID drive systems). RAID storage systems and RAID levels are well known in the art and not described in greater detail here.
Conventional RAID systems typically consist of several individual disk controllers combined with a rack or other physical configuration of drives to provide a fault-tolerant data storage system that is directly attached to a host computer. The host computer is then connected to a network of client computers to provide a large, fault-tolerant pool of storage accessible to all network clients. Typically, the disk array controller provides the brains of the data storage system, servicing all host requests, storing data to multiple drives, such as, for example, RAID drives, caching data for fast access, and handling any drive failures without interrupting host requests.
Caching is a data storage mechanism which is based on the assumption that a data fetch operation to a storage device, such as to a disk drive or RAID storage subsystem, to retrieve one item of data may be followed by a subsequent fetch operation to the same storage device to retrieve a related item of data which may frequently be a data item stored on an adjacent or sequential portion of the storage media of the storage device. Therefore, during the first read operation, not only is the required data item read, but an amount of additional data that is associated with the required data is also read. Typically, the amount of additional data read is determined by the cache memory size, the bandwidth of the communication channel between the storage device (and/or the controller) and the cache, some predetermined amount that is arbitrarily set, or the like factors as are known in the art. For example, when reading a portion of a document for a word processing application, more of the document is retrieved from the hard disk and stored in the cache than is actually required for display to the user at that time, in anticipation that the user may scroll the document and required additional data to be retrieved and displayed. The retrieval of data from the cache, usually a fast electronic Random Access Memory (RAM), is much quicker than retrieval from disk storage. Similar efficiencies may typically be realized when reading program instructions for execution, as many (though not all) instructions will execute or at least be launched in order. Additionally, branches to an instruction, even if remote from the instruction, are often cached in case the branch becomes valid. Therefore, data or other information caching (such as instruction caching) may frequently, though not necessarily always, improve input/output performance. Numerous caching schemes are known in the art and not described in greater detail here.
An input/output profile (I/O profile) of an application or workload is a characterization of the application that typically includes the type and frequency or number of I/O operations for that application. For example, the application may issue several different types of I/O operations including: small random I/O requests, small block size sequential I/O requests, large block size non-sequential I/O requests, and large block size sequential I/O requests. These types are merely examples and not intended to be limiting, as it will be appreciated by those workers having ordinary skill in the art that there may generally be a continuum of block sizes between xe2x80x9csmallxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9clargexe2x80x9d and that a xe2x80x9csmallxe2x80x9d block for some data bases or applications may be a xe2x80x9clargexe2x80x9d block for others.
Typically, the performance accomplished by an I/O controller, such as a RAID controller, and its controlled devices may be heavily dependent on the input/output (I/O) profile of its workload and the configuration or tuning of the controller, particularly relative to the use or non-use of caching. We here consider three exemplary operational I/O situations having different I/O profiles for purposes of illustration. In a workload having predominantly small-block random I/O requests, no particular advantage is gained by employing caching algorithms as random I/O requests will not typically exhibit any hits into the cache. In a workload where random I/O requests predominate, the performance is dependent on the overhead in the controller processing the I/O requests and the speed and number of disk drives attached to it. From the controller standpoint, the overhead is typically a function of the speed of instruction execution of the processor and the efficiency of its algorithms.
By comparison, small-block sequential I/O operations (for example, block sizes between about 512 and about 8K to 16K bytes) may greatly benefit from read-ahead caching because small-block sequential read operations with read-ahead caching tends to minimize the number of requests to the disks or other storage device. Increasing the number of requests to the disks tends to degrade I/O performance, particularly where the number of requests becomes large. In such instances, the use of the read-ahead caching algorithms will result in a significant performance gain over non-caching algorithms as the number of I/O requests to the disks are minimized. However, even for sequential read operations, a non-caching procedure may typically provide better performance than a caching procedure when the block size is large, as in these circumstances the performance is determined primarily by the bandwidth of the internal data paths which limits the overall rate at which data can be moved, rather than being primarily determined by caching.
Therefore, accurately determining the input/output profile of an application or workload, as well as the operational profile of the devices and/or the device controller, and configuring the device and/or device controller to optimize the types of I/O operations can greatly enhance system performance. The benefits may be particularly dramatic when a RAID controller is optimally configured for the I/O profile of the workload or application.
The performance of a RAID controller, usually specified in terms of input/output operations per second (IO/s), bandwidth (MB/s), or I/O completion time, is commercially important to the acceptance and sales of the controller in the marketplace. Competitive performance in state-of-the art RAID controllers has heretofore been achieved through several means. These means include setting various RAID controller and/or controlled device parameters (such as for example, setting or adjusting the RAID stripe size), whether read-ahead caching is enabled or disabled, whether direct I/O or cached I/O is used, whether write-back (WB) or write-through (WT) caching is used, and setting cache aging, cache size and the like.
Measured parameters may, for example, include I/O locality and I/O time. Tuned parameters may include, for example: (i) cached I/O versus direct I/O, and cache size, each of which is a typically a function of locality; (ii) stripe size, which is a function of locality and cache size; (iii) cache line aging, which is a function of locality and time; (iv) write-back caching versus write-through caching, which is a function of locality, time; and (v) WB cache size, which is a function of locality, time, and number of drives. Direct I/O refers to the capability of configurations of the controller in which data is read or written directly from the devices to the system memory through the controller. In such a situation, the data is not placed in any intermediate storage on the controller, such as a cache.
Setting or tuning these parameters in an optimum or near-optimum manner has heretofore required or at least been strongly dependent upon having an intimate knowledge of the expected I/O profile of a given workload by the user, operator, or system administrator. In addition, the system administrator also must have an intimate knowledge of the controller""s parameters and their effect on certain I/O properties. Where such intimate knowledge is lacking, parameter tuning usually has followed a trial and error approach at best, where even when a particular set of tuned parameters has been established, there is no way of knowing that those established parameters are optimum or anywhere near optimum.
In some advanced controllers, a limited number of the parameters such as read ahead enable/disable and direct vs. cached I/O are established automatically on a per-I/O basis. By automatically, we mean the controller constantly monitors the I/O stream to determine if the current I/O being processed is part of a sequential stream. In one conventional approach, the read-ahead enable/disable parameter may be adjusted automatically on an I/O-by-I/O or per-I/O basis. Unfortunately, execution of a sequentiality detection procedure (that determines if the current I/O being processed is part of a sequential stream) to select between read-ahead cache enable and read-ahead cache disable on a per-I/O operation basis imposes a significant overhead burden. Thus, while such a controller may exhibit good performance characteristics in different I/O profiles, it may not yield the maximum (or even near maximum) performance possible, for say, a pure (or nearly pure) random I/O stream where the additional overhead may be unacceptably high. This added overhead burden may not be acceptable in other situations as well. For example, it may be unacceptable for a pure random I/O data stream with a high performance requirement, such as would be encountered for a database application. Sequentiality detection can get complicated if there are multiple threads being issued in the I/O stream. This will require the controller to be able to analyze the history of several commands in order to detect sequential streams, thereby further detrimentally increasing the overhead.
Other situations can also increase overhead significantly. Pure random I/O refers to I/O where there is no repeat of an I/O operation to the same or a nearby address within some predetermined amount of time. Random I/O may have few rather than no repeats. In conventional systems and methods, manual tuning procedures directed to random I/O are typically used or tuning is made on a per-I/O basis. For such manual tuning to have any chance of success, there must be knowledge of both the storage subsystem and the application. When tuning is performed on a per-I/O basis, the result is typically a much less responsive storage subsystem. For a random type I/O operation, the overhead imposed by such a automatic detection procedure may be as high as twenty percent.
Furthermore, even where the benefits of automatic detection and adjustment of certain parameters may be desirable or would have some performance benefit, not all RAID parameters are amenable to change using conventional techniques. For example, the RAID stripe size is an important I/O performance parameter, but one that cannot be adjusted using conventional techniques. The RAID stripe size is conventionally set by a configuration utility at the time of creation of the RAID array. In order to change the stripe size after data has been loaded, a data migration operation will have to be performed by the controller. This operation will read data from the devices using the old stripe size and rewrite it using the new stripe size. While such an operation may be performed online, it usually takes on the order of at least a few hours to complete, making it very inconvenient to modify. Alternately, a test operation can also be performed when the actual data is not loaded on the array and the timing procedure recommends a new stripe size, the logical volume can simply be recreated and the actual data can then be reloaded.
Therefore there remains a need for structure, method, and computer program, that provide devices and/or device controllers, including RAID controllers, with performance tuning without the need for intimate user knowledge of the input/output profile or behavior of the device or device controller, and that does not impose significant overhead during normal operation of the system.
The invention provides structure and method for an explicitly tunable device controller, such as may for example be used in a data storage system of a computer. The inventive structure and method supports high-performance I/O performance without imposing any additional overhead during normal input/output operations. The tuning is performed during explicit pre-I/O operation tuning phase.
In one embodiment, the invention provides a method and procedures for tuning operating characteristics of a device controller to match attributes of a data stream handled by the device controller in which the method comprises: (i) monitoring a data stream and collecting attributes of the monitored data stream; (ii) generating performance metrics of the data stream based on the collected attributes and a plurality of different assumed device controller configurations; (iii) comparing expected performance of the plurality of different device controller configurations for effectiveness with a future data stream having similar data stream type attributes to the monitored data stream; and (iv) selecting device controller characteristics to provide an effective match between the data stream type and the device controller configuration. In a particular embodiment, the controller configuration is adjusted automatically and dynamically during normal input/output operations to suit the particular input/output operation encountered.
Configuration information may be selected, for example, from such configuration parameters as data redundancy level, RAID level, number of drives in a RAID array, memory module size, cache line size, direct I/O or cached I/O mode, read-ahead cache enable or read-ahead cache disable, cache line aging, cache size, and combinations thereof.
A storage device controller, such as a RAID disk array controller, implementing the inventive method in software or firmware is also provided, as are computer systems having a host computer coupled to a storage system through the inventive controller. When the invention is implemented as a procedure executing in a general purpose computer, specialized processor, or other information machine capable of executing computer program instructions, the invention further provides a computer program and a computer program product stored on a tangible media. For example, software, firmware, and/or microcode may be provided in conjunction with a processor and memory of a device controller wherein the firmware within the controller implements the inventive method and procedures.